


Never Too Late

by emynii, ObliObla



Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [30]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Season/Series 04, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 10:28:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21354784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emynii/pseuds/emynii, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: One day at a time,Dan tells himself. One day at a time.For the Whumptober prompt: recovery
Series: Nia & Obli's Whumptober 2019 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1502000
Comments: 5
Kudos: 45





	Never Too Late

**Author's Note:**

> “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”  
—Attributed to George Eliot

_ One day at a time, _ Dan tells himself. One day at a time.

But there are so many, coming at him like waves beating endlessly against the shore. Days where he has to work, where he has to take care of Trixie. Days where he has to be okay no matter how much it feels like everything inside him is falling apart. Like he is the San Andreas and the big one is coming. Saint Andrew, who was crucified on a saltire cross, his limbs spread wide.

Sometimes Dan wonders how much more he can take.

He is alone in ways he didn’t understand before. There’s Chloe, but she’s breaking under her own weight. There’s Trixie, but he refuses to burden his daughter as his mother did him. And there’s Amenadiel, but he’s never certain where they stand.

And during the first month after Charlotte, when Dan was nothing but raw nerves and spite, there was no one at all. He made it that way. 

And then there is Ella, but she is breaking too, and it hurts so much to press their jagged edges together hoping it will make either of them whole. But she is trying, and he is trying. And it has to be enough. 

But it isn’t.

Dan knows how to hate himself, has lived on that edge long enough he’s afraid to step away—what would even be left of him if he did? And _ oh _it is so much easier to just hate Lucifer, that physical embodiment of everything he once wanted. 

But it seems the price of getting what he wanted was getting what he’d once wanted, and now he wears his guilt like a brand burned into his skin.

It is a quiet morning; there is no one waiting for him. He kneels to pray beside his bed, clutching a rosary still caked with dust, and speaks prayers he barely remembers the words to. But he doesn’t have faith in this, only has memories of his father doing the same, stumbling over the words, trying to remember. Dan wishes he didn’t know how to have faith; it would hurt less if hope didn’t lick against his skin like flames, scorching him from the inside. 

No one else can see the burns, can see how his flesh splits and cracks.

He doesn’t know when he started missing the grief, started liking the way it simplified his world. But he almost got Trixie killed, almost got Eve killed. _ Innocents. _

Nothing is simple, now.

And the days beat against his shore as the blows of his supposed brothers in blue who told him this was his rite of passage, who said it would cleanse him of doubts. He was baptized in the font of his own blood, but all it got him was a broken nose and corrupt men who knew all his weaknesses.

It never washed him clean.

But he can’t stop, he can’t give up. There are people who need him. There are people who _ he _ needs, and he’s beginning to understand that both are necessary to do that strange, nebulous thing called _ healing. _

His wounds were on the inside, and his scars are too, and they itch and they burn, and he tears at his skin because of it. But this pain is so much sweeter because he knows that this is what recovery feels like. That it hurts to step away from the edge of oblivion and tell the darkness in his soul, _ No, not today. _

It would be so much easier to give up, but there are too many things he has come to realize he truly _ has _that he’s not willing to let go of.

And the days wash over him, trying to drag him under, but there is always someone to reach down and offer him a hand, even if it’s just his own.

_ One day at a time, _Dan tells himself. One day at a time.

And he begins, slowly, to believe it.


End file.
